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Interview: Tangerine for Mac

Tangerine for Mac just got released into Beta by Potionfactory last week. It's …

Last week, when Potion Factory announced on their company blog that they were releasing into Beta a new software called Tangerine, the eyes of OCD exercisers lit up. Tangerine was rolled out as a piece of software written to save people the time and monotony from trying to come up with their own consistent, upbeat playlists for running or jogging (or just plain working it at the gym).

It does this by analyzing the BPM and beat intensity of your iTunes library. You can then create playlists based off of the BPM and beat intensity, but it's not as simple-sounding as you think (in a good way). When you go into the playlist creator, you can specify the exact length of time that you want your playlist to last, the BPM range you want it to cover, and the beat intensity range you want it to cover. You can then specify a Generation Pattern for how you want the tunes to be organized—for serious exercisers, this is icing on the cake.

This, as you can imagine, seems to be the perfect match to the Nike+iPod Sport Kit. Nike offers their own set of upbeat playlists through iTunes, but you couldn't create your own unless you did it manually. I've already created multitudes of Tangerine playlists for myself at various workout lengths, intensities, and different song patterns. Keeping the entire playlist within a certain range of beats means that I can be 100% sure I'm keeping up my pace when running outside, as I can just run or jog directly with the beat and not have to worry that my songs are slowing me down unconsciously.

Tangerine is currently in Beta, which expires at the end of this month. I highly recommend that our readers download and try it out, especially if you guys are runners, joggers, or walkers. There are some bugs of course, but the folks at Potionfactory welcome bug reports and have been quick to stay on top of them since Tangerine's introduction last week already. One thing to keep in mind from the blog post (and this does suck, I will give you that):

Tangerine is Tiger only and it cannot (at least not yet) analyze iTunes purchased tracks due to the DRM.

Boo.

We asked the guys at Potion Factory, Andy Kim and Jin Kim, to do an interview with us about this piece of software that I've already fallen in love with. Their answers to my questions give a lot more insight into Tangerine and what they see for its future.

You say in your blog post that the idea sprung from spending too much time trying to create iTunes playlists that jived with your workouts. Can you expand more on that, and how the inspiration hit?

It feels like a different time and a different me, but I used to go to the gym 6 or 7 times a week. At first I just used the shuffle feature like I would normally but the shuffle is just terrible when you're working out because you constantly have to skip the slow tunes. I felt like I was spending more time fumbling and skipping tracks than enjoying the music. So then I tried building playlists with upbeat music and after one workout I knew that there was no other way to fly. However, the process took too long and now I was feeling like I was spending more time building the playlist than actually working out.

This was around the time when Jin and I were thinking about forming a company anyway so the idea of an application that would pick out exercise music sounded pretty good. We both quit our jobs and to my big surprise it didn't take much to convince Jin, the same Jin that had been a Windows user since the days of DOS, to go Mac only. The timing was perfect because the low cost Mac mini had just come out. It was the perfect gateway drug for Jin. I had been a Mac user only about 4 months as well, but still, armed with a Mac mini and a PowerBook, we set out to conquer the world in our own way. Tangerine was much more ambitious and bigger in scope back then so we had a pretty big challenge ahead of ourselves. Looking back in hindsight, I would rate that challenge a 100, on a scale of 1 to 5.

How long did writing the current Beta version of Tangerine take? Did you run into any snags along the way?

Overall, it took about 6 months with a big break in the middle and a big redesign in the latter half.

We had lots of big and small snags along the way. I always pretend that learning is easy, but the first hurdle was getting acquainted with the Mac APIs. We started by asking what is Carbon and what is Cocoa? We almost went with Carbon because C and C++ was more familiar grounds to us. Now I know how silly that is but we were that new to the Mac. Another hurdle was learning the math that I had forgotten since college and the digital signal processing that I had never learned at all. Despite of all that we managed to get the BPM analyzer part done eventually. Early playlist tests showed that running to the beat of the music really keeps you motivated. It's almost as if your body goes into autopilot mode.

Then came podcasting. We just wanted to try a small app to get an idea of what selling software directly to Mac consumers was like and Podcast Maker seemed like a perfect application for that. We planned to get back to Tangerine after only spending about a month on Podcast Maker, but it took on a life of its own and we ended up spending the rest of 2005 and a good portion of 2006 on it.

After that we didn't add a single line of code to Tangerine until we saw Nike+ and the iTunes update that came with it. When we finally saw it, it became clear that Tangerine would be a really good fit for Nike+. Still, it was hard to get excited about the project again because so much time had passed since we had felt the burning need for it for our own use. The other hard thing was that nobody around us ever got excited about the app idea. We did stay the course but just finishing it for the beta was a hurdle. The overwhelming response to the beta has made us forget the lack of sleep these past few days though and it really makes you thank yourself for believing in something that others didn't.

Is there a way to create playlists from Tangerine only from a specific set of songs or an already-existing playlist? Sometimes, I don't want my classical music mixed in with my Justin Timberlake for working out.

You can filter songs out from the entire application by setting up rules in the preferences. They work much like the smart playlist editor in iTunes. However, a lot of testers have sent us feedback saying that they want to choose only a subset of their entire library when creating playlists. We plan to change the design a little bit to allow that in version 1.0.

One of the most pleasant surprises in the software was the "Generation Pattern" option when creating a playlist. It really helped me work in music to various types of workouts, such as intervals. Where did you get the idea to add in the Generation Pattern option?

It was a feature that we wanted for ourselves so it was a no brainer. I went through some treadmill manuals to come up with those. Having just 4 patterns may seem limited, but if you hold down the option key the plus button turns into an append button. You can create very complex playlists that way.

Are there more features that you expect to add before the final release? What kinds of features do you see adding to Tangerine in the future?

In addition to more sophisticated playlist generation mechanisms, we might add a manual BPM calculation feature to supplement the analyzer. Even if we don't have this ready for the 1.0 we will put it in sometime through a minor release. The reason why you need it is because just like any BPM analyzer, ours has inherent limitations. For one, it needs beats or recurring impulses in the music to be able to calculate tempo. A lot of music--chiefly Classical and some Jazz--don't have this so in those cases you need some human help.

Do you have an expected release date for the final version?

We guesstimate that it will take about two weeks to get things stable and to get other things ready. This isn't a promise or an announcement of any kind though because we won't release it until it is ready.

As you acknowledged, Tangerine seems to be the perfect fit for people using their iPods with the Nike+iPod Sport Kit. I'm never going to leave the house again without a Tangerine-generated playlist. Admit it: are you hoping that Apple sees this too and maybe even buys the rights to Tangerine to integrate into iTunes one day?

Hahaha, not really. I mean, we would definitely consider it seriously if an offer was ever made, but we are fine with Tangerine growing up as a Potion Factory product. We want to see it mature and find a home in many user's Macs through its own merits.

Besides your own stuff, what are some of your other favorite free or shareware apps for OS X that get you through the day?

I use quite a lot of them now. In no particular order:

roobaSwitch - This app switches your app's data files around, such as the preferences and the stuff in the Application Support folder. It's a lifesaver for me because it lets me wear different hats during development. At the end of the day, I switch back to my personal profile and I'm back to being a user of my own apps.

KIT - It's much more than a note organizer but that's what I use it as. Sticky.app wasn't scaling very well. It's like iTunes for files so I'm using only about 5% of its capabilities.

VoodooPad - I'm not a Wiki writing type of guy but I started experimenting with this app. It takes some time getting used to, but I have a feeling I'm going to come to depend on it the way I depend on my opposable thumbs.

Growl - For notifications, of course.

NetNewsWire - I have been neglecting NNW for a while because of Tangerine but one should not try being a feed junky without it.

WebNoteHappy - Don't del.icio.us without it.

FlexTime - Helps me schedule and perform timed tasks efficiently.

iShowU - I use this to quickly record something off the screen to email. If a screenshot is worth a thousand words, then a movie is worth... more.

BuildFactory - Continuous integration tool for developers.

Carbon Emacs - The one editor to edit them all!!!

Transmit - Jin uses this as his FTP client of choice. I don't blame him for choosing it because those Panic guys just drip with style. They pretty much define Macintosh culture.

AppZapper - Jin also uses this one a lot. Nine out of ten times I forget to use it and just delete the app.

Finally, what is/are your main machine(s)? Hardware, software, processor--all the gory details. We are geeks; we like this kind of stuff.

We have moved on from the 1st gen Mac mini and the 1Ghz G4 PowerBook. We both work on the Core Duo iMacs now. Let me tell you, those machines increased our productivity tenfold. I simply can't write code on my old PowerBook anymore.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui